NumberPicks is a small site with one job: take the odds and prize data the California Lottery already publishes for its scratchers, add the historical draw data for Mega Millions and Powerball, and put it in one place where a player can actually compare games. It is written and maintained by one person — me — and this page exists so you know who that is and how the numbers are produced.
My name is Jose Ortiz. I run Ortiz Labs LLC, a software company in West Jordan, Utah, and I write the code behind this site. I am a software developer, not a statistician and not a lottery expert. That distinction matters, so I am putting it in writing: I have no inside information about California scratchers, no relationship with the California State Lottery, and no ability to tell you which ticket in the roll at your store is a winner. Nobody has that.
I built the site because comparing scratchers is genuinely annoying. The odds for each game are public, the number of prizes already claimed is public, and the top prizes still unclaimed are public — but they live in three different places and no one puts them side by side. Doing that in a spreadsheet is fine for one game and unbearable for ninety.
Nothing here is scraped from a competitor site, and no numbers are typed in by hand. The pages are rebuilt automatically after each update.
The score on each scratcher is a percentile composite — deliberately simple, and published so you can disagree with it:
One thing to be honest about: the ticket counts are estimates, not published figures. The lottery publishes how many top prizes have been claimed, and the odds of winning that tier, so the remaining tickets can be estimated from those two numbers. They are close enough to rank games against each other and not precise enough to bet your rent on. Every page that shows them says so.
This is the part most lottery sites leave out, and it is the reason I can sleep with the ads running:
Advertising. The site carries Google AdSense placements, and those ads pay for the hosting and the time. Two consequences you should know: advertisers have no influence over the rankings — the score is computed from the public data described above and nothing else, and no game can pay to move up. If an ad ever looks like a lottery service claiming to improve your odds, treat it with the same skepticism you should apply to any such claim.
If a number on this site is wrong, I want to know — a bad estimate is worse than no estimate. Write to the contact page with the page and the figure, and I will check it against the source data and fix it. Pages that change carry a visible update date under their title.
Last reviewed: · For entertainment only. 18+. If gambling is a problem for you, call 1-800-GAMBLER.